~ Many helpful hints on living your life more successfully.

A few simple improvements to a standard spell checker.

Some people are poor at spelling the English language. It may be some genetic thing, like blindness, or having a different nose shape from most of the local people. Perhaps these poor spellers would do quite well with a more visually symbolic written language like Chinese, and perhaps this could be determined by interviewing people who know both languages to discover if there is an overlap in this disability.

The current spell checkers for the English language work reasonably well, where they present several of their best guesses at the word you intend, but then of course you must have sufficient visual recognition knowledge to recognize the word to choose the right one. Sometimes you do recognize the right word but miss aim your cursor and click the wrong word. Then of course that word is correctly spelled, but it is the wrong word and must be identified in context when rereading the text.

Some new spelling options could be available for proofreading and making the text more specific: 1. When any word in the text is right-clicked a definition appears, and a menu of options would appear also. 2. This definition would be linked, with a single further click, to a good online dictionary like TheFreeDictionary.com. 3. One option would be to assume the word is misspelled and the usual list of alternate similar words would appear. 4. Another option would assume the word is properly spelled but you want a single-click list of synonyms. 5. A curious option would be to automatically replace words in a paragraph with synonyms. There could be several levels of intensity of this replacement function. 6. A list of synonyms, and short phrases, could be ordered in frequency of usage, or for easy of understanding by foreign readers of a given language. 7. A list of quotations related to the clicked word would broaden a person’s thoughts on the subject. 8. Links to the subject and authors on the subject. 9. The word could link to other times you have used it.

All of these functions could be built into the spell checker as part of the word-processor.